one of the heroes of the Sharjah biennial, Eduardo Terrazas, born in Mexico in 1936, abstract indigenous 'paintings': wool yarn on board covered with wax done by Huicholes an indigenous group of Mexico in the 1970s

Eduardo Terrazas, abstract indigenous works

Eduardo Terrazas, acrylic on painting

Eduardo Terrazas, Possibilities of a Combination

view of the corridor of the Sharjah Art Museum with Eduardo Terrazas work

Simon Fujiwara recreation of the Passion, attempt to recreate a lost photo of his mother

Amina Menia's research into Algerias' Monument of the Death built by the French in 1922 and encased by the Algerian authorities in 1970 as a protest against colonialism

Magdi Mostafa's washing machines

Lamia Joreige, Objects Missing from the National Museum of Beirut

and the view from the rooftop of the Sharjah Islamic Bank

Superflex's playground park, my favourite work of the biennial, where they asked people in the area (mainly immigrant workers) what elements would they like to have in the park they were going to build

Wael Shawky's 'Dictums 10:120' performance where the biennale's press release is converted into a qawwali song. Comprised of fragments from curatorial statement translated into Urdu, and sung as devotional Sufi music

Shiro Takatani's fog machine in courtyard

Francis Alys, 'Don't cross the bridge before you get to the river' project to connect Africa and Europe through the straight of Gibraltar

Francis Alys' Morocco paintings

Gabriel Orozco's sand pyramid on a table

Wei Liu's exotic lands

Marwan Rechmaoui, copies of maps of Palestinian in Lebanon done by its inhabitants

Shilpa Gupta, A library of 100 books written anonymously or under pseudonyms

Tamar Guimaraes and Kasper Akhøj's 'Situation leading to a Courtyard'

Lucia Koch's filtered patio ceiling

and the second of Studio Mumbai's Immediate Shelter, resting courtyard covered with fisherman net

Studio Mumbai's pavilion at night

Studio Mumbai's pavilion number 2 at night

and Sharjah's use of public space

CAMP's outdoor cinema showing their research film 'From Gulf to Gulf'

Sharjah Biennial's outdoor cinema, with a film programme curated by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

and Superflex's park activated by people at night
Superflex's park at night!

A Western perspective once dominated the debate about globalisation. However, over the years, the work of scholars like Andre Gunder Frank has challenged this normative approach. In ReOrient, Frank points to the history of transnational relations that thrived across and between the Arab world and Asia from the 8th to the 15th century, when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. Frank notes that these transnational relationships were not limited to trade, but included a great deal of cultural exchange and shared production. During this period, the central actors were Arabian traders, some of whom eventually settled permanently in China.

The Silk Road, which spanned both ocean and land, not only stimulated economic exchange and development but also vastly reshaped our cultures. Illuminating these shared historical roots in the context of the present allows us to re-orientate ourselves once again, and to reexamine the historically significant geopolitical and cultural role of the Arabian Peninsula.

In the 13th century, the great historian and lawyer Ibn Battuta traveled around the world, beginning from its centre in the Middle East and moving through North Africa, parts of Europe, India, and China. Ibn Battuta's record of his journey reveals that unlike Marco Polo, for example, his perception and interpretation of what he encountered was framed by an immersion in the scholarly traditions of Islamic philosophy and Quranic studies.

Ibn Battuta was welcomed everywhere he went. He exchanged knowledge and wisdom with his hosts. In most cases, the physical venue in which such exchanges took place was an Islamic courtyard. Islamic courtyards incorporated water, greenery and sunlight, creating an analogy with paradise. They were symbolic locations. In practice, although they appeared to be private spaces, they also had a public dimension, as people from outside could be invited in.

I was inspired by the courtyard in Islamic architecture, in particular the historical courtyards of Sharjah, where elements of both public and private life intertwine, where the ‘objective’ political world and the introspective space of subjectivity intersect and overlap. Originally private in nature, they can also function, to varying degrees, as ‘public’ social spaces depending on their size and location. Large courtyards are often more open and can be used for performances and events. Courtyards housing craftsmen's studios and exhibition spaces may function as semi-public areas. Some courtyards are completely private, requiring an invitation for more intimate gatherings. There is richness to courtyards as spaces that have the potential to intensely accumulate the memories of a local culture. The exchanges and encounters they host enable people to produce new knowledge.

I intend to use the courtyard as the central concept for this Biennial in two ways. It will be used both as a practical site and as a metaphorical condition for stimulating cultural negotiations and generating knowledge.

Sharjah hosts a large number of migrants. It is a place where people from diverse cultural backgrounds can meet and share the information and embodied knowledge they have brought with them from home. In doing so, they are collectively participating in ‘placemaking’ within this geographical space that they cohabit.

This emphasis on embodied knowledge and imagery can be partly seen as a criticism of Western normative thought’s focus on language and logic. The long and rich cultural traditions of the Arab world, North Africa, India and Asia manifest themselves through various practices and customs from song and dance, to poetry and music, daily etiquette, architectural patterns, the shapes of spaces and the contours of gardens. The same can be said of South America, where the influence of pre-colonial practices and the vibrant culture of the Amazon can still be detected.

In selecting artists for the Biennial, we sought out individuals who have a deep interest in the culture in which they were raised, and who are creatively engaged in exploring this background. When such artists visit a new location, they perceive and interpret it through the lens of their own unique subjectivity, formed gradually within their culture(s) of origin out of an amalgam of sedimented habits and sensibilities. In doing so, they enter into a dialectical relationship with this new locale, producing, as a result, new knowledge in conversation with it. This process produces hybrid knowledge and intercultural products that could potentially constitute the genetic material for a novel culture.

All people internalise the practices - songs, dances, culinary techniques - that characterise their cultures, preserving them as bodily memories. We are all ‘cultural experts’ in some form or another. Every individual has the capacity to make a contribution to culture by sharing his or her knowledge with a local host encountered in a courtyard.

Being open to the practice of sharing is an essential requirement for successful participation in the conversations and experiences courtyards can potentially play host to. For this reason, the Biennial exhibitions will involve practitioners from a wide variety of genres including, architects, researchers, and performers

It is, in this sense, that the courtyard can be transformed from a place into a ‘condition’ or a catalyst. Is it a test? Is culture - rather than being organically formed - cultivated out of the will, critical faculties and practices of individuals?

The courtyard is also seen as a ‘plane of experience’ and an ‘experiment’ – as an arena for learning and critical thinking of a discursive and embodied kind. It is a generative space with the potential to produce new awareness and knowledge.

Sharjah is now attempting to create new cultural genes in collaboration with the migrants it hosts, as it simultaneously reconstructs the past. Now that the postcolonial debate is coming to an end, this situation can be valuable as preparations are made for the future. We can see here the preliminary contours of a new space for cultural production.

I am inviting a selection of architects and cultural practitioners from Lebanon, India, Belgium, Japan, Spain and elsewhere to create temporary architectural interventions that will help envision new urban structures that connect Sharjah’s historic area and its courtyard typology with the larger city.

Courtyard cultures around the world conceal their great potential. These spaces are concentrated symbols of years of rich cultural accumulation. They originated in great civilisations that morphed into countries stagnated by the transition to ‘modernity’. These countries currently inhabit a moment of enormous potential, energised as they are by the forces of globalisation, by the vibrant cultural exchanges migration has facilitated, and by increased socio-cultural, political and economic hybridisation. I am not referring to monotonous and perfunctory data sharing and consumption, but to the production of new knowledge that can be potentially enabled by the courtyard - a space and a symbol that resists the destruction of culture. Within this space, the international and local encounter one another and negotiate the effects of each passing wave of globalisation.

By using the courtyard as a key concept in mapping out a new cultural cartography, I see the potential for a deeper collaboration between the Arab world and South America.

An examination of H.H. Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qasimi’s extensive collection of maps, housed within the Centre for Gulf Studies, reveals the way maps change and differ depending on the perspective of the individual who draws them. My concept for the Biennial seeks to emphasise and reinforce the important role that perspective and subjectivity play in the way socio-cultural spaces, geographical landscapes and physical locales are perceived, interpreted and engaged with.

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...